European Coastal Airlines, who operate seaplanes connecting Croatian islands with the mainland, have suspended operations after an investigation into the safety of the planes by a leading Croatian news portal…

Index.hr published an article on Saturday 13 August 2016 questioning the safety and maintenance of the seaplanes, quoting former and current ECA employers. European Coastal Airlines CEO Klaus Dieter Martin responded early this afternoon with this statement.

Dear Passengers, Friends and Supporters,

Due to recent developments within our airline we would like to inform you about the actual state of affairs.Currently European Coastal Airlines has paused its flight operations for a few days. This is related to the fact that additional administrational tasks requested by the CCAA (Croatian Civil Aviation Authority) have to be fulfilled.

ECA is summerizing the requested paperwork at the shortest period of time and is expecting to proceed with flight operations as soon as mid of next week. As in all professional businesses, sometimes an employer and an employee are not a good fit.

The same happened to us with some employees. These employees have been removed from their duty due to insufficient level of quality in their performance, manners at work and/or team spirit.

The CCAA, various media houses and other institutions have been given false internal information by these former employees, as a revenge to our company. Naturally and thankfully, the CCAA has been at an audit and will proceed auditing our efforts. We highly appreciate this, as our utmost priority is the safety of our passengers. For this reason we have for the time being – discontinued our flight operations. We are happy to proof our ability to operate safe, reliable and comfortable at competitive pricing, once the last single doubt in regards to the quality of our work has been eliminated.

Our focus lies on taking care of our passengers who have booked flights with us in the upcoming days. We are in process to contact every single passenger, issue refunds for all tickets and advise on alternate transportation possibilities.

Also, we will help organizing these. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience caused from our side. Please rest assured we will do all we can to be there for you and assist wherever we can.

European Coastal Airlines will give an official update on Tuesday on the actual state of affairs.